Anyway, the music of Christy’s high school band was not unlike what she makes now: “It was the era of the Burrito Brothers and Gram and Emmylou, and so that was kind of the inspiration, although there were other things, too, like the early Elton John Tumbleweed Connection.”
Didn’t matter, just a phase. “After that, I tried to straighten up and fly right and become a serious college person,” she says with a slight smile. “College people weren’t in bands. It’s something I tried to suppress forever, but my parents were professionals. You don’t do music as a job, as a lifestyle; that’s something you do as a hobby. While I was in college I never even dreamed of being in a band. So, of course, everybody I met and got to be friends with all happened to be musicians.”
She finished with a degree in anthropology, waited tables, played music, married a musician by the name of Scott McCaughey, kept her own last name (which is actually Wilson; she adopted McWilson as a stage name years ago). “At some point I gave up and succumbed to the fact that some things are predestined,” she says.
They moved from California to Seattle long before that was trendy. In the early 1980s, McCaughey created a kind of West Coast answer to the Replacements, and the Young Fresh Fellows ended up playing Paul Westerberg’s wedding. Christy sang with the Power Mowers (“Wanda Jackson meets James Brown,” they hoped) and the Dynette Set.
And then their daughter Nadine was born, she formed the Picketts, Scott became a touring member of R.E.M., the Picketts put out three albums (two for Rounder, the first for PopLlama), and things got complicated.
More than a century of feminists have sought equality, have fought bruising battles to redefine their position in society. That has left tough, uncertain, evolving choices — for both sexes. For a time, at least on the Left Coast, motherhood was viewed as a cop-out, an admission of career failure. Not tough enough to cut it in a man’s world.
In that context or something like it — pregnancy did not at first seem a blessing to McWilson. “I was embarrassed to be having a kid, to tell you the truth,” she says. “I tried to hide. I was determined to stay in the Power Mowers as long as I could. I did not want to be pregnant, I just felt like it was a gyp. I felt like, how come men don’t have to go through this?
“And then I had the kid. I had a really intense labor, 52 hours. And when I came through that, I went, Oh, my god, that was unbelievable. And I started looking at it differently right off the git-go. My whole vision of it started changing, from the delivery on. I felt kind of privileged, almost, to have experienced that.
“I started noticing all these things, biologically. Like, if Nadine cried in the night, my eyes just flew right open, and Scott would sleep through it.
“What I learned from being a mom is that the priorities are all wrong in this country, that there needs to be a really strong focus on children, by both parents, by the whole community.”
She also learned how difficult it was to balance the inherently selfish needs of an artist against the inherently selfless needs of parenting.
“It’s really hard to be creative and always be at the beck and call of the little dictator,” she says, and it’s probably important to note the warmth with which she says “little dictator.” “This seems really symbolic to me. I was trying to get the words to [Yoko Ono’s] ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, and I was in the kitchen, away from the kids and the TV, and I had a tape recorder. It took me over an hour to write the lyrics down, because I could not get one sentence written down without being interrupted.”
None of which, by the way, is meant for a critique of her husband. “I think Scott’s really a great dad, really involved,” she says.
Her band at the time, the Picketts, became more important to her than anybody in the audience might have guessed. “I needed to have a dividing line,” says McWilson. “I think the band was like me holding onto a raft. Like I’m in the water. I’m not on the raft, but I’m hanging on to it. I think the Picketts helped me; when I played a show, I would be completely out of that environment of fish crackers and Juicy-Juice. I really developed this awe for other mothers, and I started defending them.”
